iiNet buys up more bandwidth on Southern Cross

Need for speed behind deal, not TPG/PPC1 hookup

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iiNet has boosted its international cable capacity reserves by securing a new supply agreement with Southern Cross Cables, which will upgrade the ISP's bandwidth from 20Gbps to 200Gbps.

The multi-year agreement deal is an extension of a long-standing supply agreement with Southern Cross, which provides capacity from Australia and New Zealand into the USA.

iiNet says the enhanced capacity will strengthen its position in providing content, apps and services in the move towards a more competitive NBN environment.

While the carrier also has significant capacity with PPC1, has booked space on to-be-launched cable Pacific Fibre and was also a launch customer for the TPG-owned PPC1 link, iiNet CTO John Lindsay said the additional capacity was also needed for redundancy.

“Southern Cross is a dual path system and we use it in a protected mode so any single point failure in their network can be bypassed without impacting services. When we use single path cables and we have over 30 gigabits on PPC1, we generally need path protection from another cable,” Lindsay told The Register.

He added that the carrier will also take more capacity on PPC1 in the future.

Meanwhile, Pacific Fibre, a Kiwi-based company is planning to build a submarine cable network with two 5 Tbps-capable fibres connecting Australia, New Zealand and America via the Pacific by 2014.

Lindsay said that while iiNet has committed to Pacific Fibre, the internet waits for no cable.

“If built, by the time Pacific Fibre is ready for service we will have largely used all the capacity we are buying from Southern Cross so this is not an alternative as much as a necessary network upgrade. We can't very well tell our customers to avoid the internet until 2014,” he quipped.